Includes criticism and interpretation of William Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Persuasion, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens and Bleak House, George Eliot and Middlemarch, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, James Joyce and Ulysses, Virginia Woolf and Orlando, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Fernando Pessoa.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND KIRKUS REVIEWS Hailed as “the indispensable critic” by The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom— New York Times bestselling writer and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University—has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. Now he turns at long last to his beloved writers of our national literature in an expansive and mesmerizing book that is one of his most incisive and profoundly personal to date. A product of five years of writing and a lifetime of reading and scholarship, The Daemon Knows may be Bloom’s most masterly book yet. Pairing Walt Whitman with Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne with Henry James, Mark Twain with Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens with T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner with Hart Crane, Bloom places these writers’ works in conversation with one another, exploring their relationship to the “daemon”—the spark of genius or Orphic muse—in their creation and helping us understand their writing with new immediacy and relevance. It is the intensity of their preoccupation with the sublime, Bloom proposes, that distinguishes these American writers from their European predecessors. As he reflects on a lifetime lived among the works explored in this book, Bloom has himself, in this magnificent achievement, created a work touched by the daemon. Praise for The Daemon Knows “Enrapturing . . . radiant . . . intoxicating . . . Harold Bloom, who bestrides our literary world like a willfully idiosyncratic colossus, belongs to the party of rapture.” —Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review “The capstone to a lifetime of thinking, writing and teaching . . . The primary strength of The Daemon Knows is the brilliance and penetration of the connections Bloom makes among the great writers of the past, the shrewd sketching of intellectual feuds or oppositions that he calls agons. . . . Bloom’s books are like a splendid map of literature, a majestic aerial view that clarifies what we cannot see from the ground.” — The Washington Post “Audacious . . . The Yale literary scholar has added another remarkable treatise to his voluminous body of work.” — The Huffington Post “The sublime The Daemon Knows is a veritable feast for the general reader (me) as well as the advanced (I assume) one.” —John Ashbery “Mesmerizing.” —New York Journal of Books “Bloom is a formidable critic, an extravagant intellect.” —Chicago Tribune “As always, Bloom conveys the intimate, urgent, compelling sense of why it matters that we read these canonical authors.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Few people write criticism as nakedly confident as Bloom’s any more.” — The Guardian (U.K.)

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"With a language disappearing every two weeks and neologisms springing up almost daily, understanding the origins and currency of language has never seemed more relevant. In this charming volume, expert linguist David Crystal proves why the story of language deserves retelling. From an infant's first words to the peculiar dialect of text messaging, A Little Book of Language ranges widely, revealing language's myriad intricacies and quirks. Crystal delves into the development of unique linguistic styles, the origins of obscure accents and the search for the first written word. He discusses the plight of endangered languages, as well as successful cases of linguistic revitalisation. Much more than a history, this book also turns to the future of language, exploring the effect of technology on our day-to-day reading, writing and speech. Through enlightening diagrams and quizzes, as well as Crystal's avuncular and entertaining style, A Little Book of Language reveals the story of language to be a captivating tale for all ages"--Inside front flap.

The Purloined Clinic is a retrospective of essays, reviews, and reports that reflect the range and depth of Janet Malcolm's engagement with psychology, criticism, art, and literature. She examines aspects of "that absurdist collaboration," the psychoanalytic dialogue, from which come "small, stray sell recognitions that no other human relationship yields, brought forward under conditions . . . that no other human relationship could survive." She addresses such subjects as Tom Wolfe's vendetta against modern architecture, Milan Kundera's literary experiments, and Vaclav Havel's prison letters. She explores the somewhat deflated world of post-revolutionary Prague, guides us through the labyrinthine New York art world of the eighties, and takes us behind the one-way mirror of Salvador Minuchin's school of family therapy. And to each subject she brings the incisive skepticism and dazzling epigrammatic style that are her hallmarks. “Why don’t more people write like [Malcolm]? . . . She is cast from the mold of the Eastern European intellectual: beholden to modernism. as familiar with Kundera’s exile as she is with Freud’s Vienna. This sensibility must grant her the detachment she sometimes so mercilessly employs, but it also gives her an unassailable passion for getting to the center of things.” — Boston Globe

Leon Wolff tells the full story, revealing how and why the U.S. went from aiding Filipino independence to forcefully annexing the islands for themselves.

"Why do we spend time reading and discussing books which tell of events which never in fact occurred?" The question is elementary - and yet, as David Daiches suggests in this provocative study, it is the elementary questions that are never answered. Although literary criticism today is more concerned with technique than with the basic question of value, the question of value underlies all the others. Professor Daiches therefore directs this book to the search for the basic function and purpose of imaginative prose and poetry. A Study of Literature is not, however, an obscure book of literary theory; it contains abundant and pungent examples and critical analyses - of prose fiction, of modern writing, and of the nature of poetry. "It's main purpose," as Professor Daiches says, "is to help the reader of works of imaginative literature to see what he is reading, to understand just what it is that he gets from different kinds of reading, and to discriminate between those different kinds."

"A celebration of the power and wonder of lifelong reading-both secular and sacred Zibby Owens, My Most Anticipated Books 2025 In Children of the Book, Ilana Kurshan explores the closeness forged when family life unfolds against a backdrop of reading together. Kurshan, a mother of five living in Jerusalem, at first struggles to balance her passion for literature with her responsibilities as a parent. Gradually she learns how to relate to reading not as a solitary pursuit and an escape from the messiness of life, but rather as a way of teaching independence and forging connection. Introducing her children to sacred and secular literature-including the beloved classics of her childhood-helps her become both a better mother and a better reader. Chief among the books Kurshan reads with her children is the Five Books of Moses, known as the Torah, which Jews the world over read in synchrony as part of the liturgical cycle. In the five parts of this memoir, Kurshan explores the surprising resonances between the biblical text and her experiences as a mother and a reader - from the first picture books that create the world through language for little babies, to the moment our children begin reading on their own leaving us behind, atop the mountain, as they enter new lands without us. A testament to the enduring power of shared texts, Children of the Book celebrates the deep pleasures of books"-- Provided by publisher.

The literature on Nathanael West by this time is larger, no doubt, than his entire output—less than 450pages in the one-volume complete edition. Yet West’s four short novels, all written in the 1930s and surrounded by his reputation as a Hollywood script writer, continue to fascinate readers, who still look for sign and symbol of the books’ importance. Irving Malin, a frequent contributor to this series, has taken a new approach to West’s novels. Rather than an examination of sources, his new book provides, for the first time, a chronological, chapter-by-chapter examination of the novels. This detailed textual explication shows the novels’ designs, which create their powerful effects by the accumulation of significant recurring details.